Roll out the carols?

Yep, yep. I'm 37 years old now. Reckon I best be windin' down for old-timer life now.
I went ahead and turned 37 recently. I thought, what the heck, might as well age another year. I'm putting on years like I'm putting on pounds lately. The sticky notes my therapist made me place around my house reminding me of good things about me that don't have to do with appearance or age have softened the blow. They really do work!

I've been admiring Leon. He is swell, I tell ya. I've been thinking how lucky I am to be able to stay at home with him while he is growing up. We accepted living with low finances, but not everyone has that choice. I can't imagine in the States where moms have to go back to work after a couple months! How horrible! I can't even imagine after a year! They are still such young young babies. I've noticed, through Leon, how at around 9 months, he's started to learn something new everyday. I can see him growing right in front of me and I feel really lucky that I don't have to miss out on that. I'm super aware of how he will only be an infant and a toddler once and it will go by so quick and I just want to absorb it and be there for as much of it as I can. It's tough some days, being with a baby full-time, but honestly, I wouldn't give it up for a trillion dollars.

I have way strong mom empathy now, so that when I see other children, I worry about them too. I saw a baby in a restaurant who was hungry and I was all tense until I saw the mother nurse her. If I see babies with really young, rough looking parents, I worry like crazy about them. My heart bleeds for any baby that needs anything. I could lay awake gritting my teeth at night worrying about babies who don't have good parents and are neglected or scared or hungry or anything bad. It's emotionally exhausting. How terrible that anything bad ever happens. I want to swoop up all the babies of the world up and make sure every one of them is happy.

Leon is sleeping pretty good recently. It's lucky. When we ran out of tools to help him to sleep, we had to dabble in letting him cry, but I couldn't ever stomach it for more than a few minutes and ended up quitting it. He's getting better at it on his own. I have no idea what will happen when we don't nurse anymore, but I'll face that when we get there. I'm happy to nurse him, even if it's 3am, because that won't last forever either. However, I'm thankful I'm not nursing him 5 or 6 times a night anymore!

So December approaches and I heard my first Christmas carol on the radio yesterday. Can you believe it? Christmas. Aye yai yai. I'll haul out our wee tree soon and put it somewhere high up and decorate it to honor the winter wonders and we'll see what this winter has to bring. I have a icky feeling it's going to be a rainy winter so I'm gunning for some snow, but we'll see how I feel about that when I'm cooped up in our apartment watching a snow storm rage outside.

My computer battery is about to die and my eyelids are heavy. So 37. Yeah! Let's see how it turns out for me. Rock and roll.